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News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
Jeff Bezos marries Lauren Sánchez in over-the-top wedding in Italy
Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos married Lauren Sánchez in Venice, Italy, in an over-the-top wedding that the newlyweds have been celebrating for several days — even though they were already legally married. On Friday evening, a tuxedo-clad Bezos, 61, and Sánchez, 55, exchanged vows on the San Giorgio Maggiore island in front of a barrage of star-studded guests including several Trumps, a couple Kardashians, a few Jenners, Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, Barbra Streisand and Orlando Bloom — sans Katy Perry, Page Six reports. Attendees were reportedly greeted by the sounds of a gospel choir, which broke out into Whitney Houston's 'Higher Love' during the ceremony. Family and friends cheered and whistled for the Mr. and Mrs., who sealed their marriage with a kiss. The ceremony is expected to be followed by an extravagant reception that will spare no expense. In fact, Page Six was told that the couple's three-day wedding weekend, which was organised by George and Amal Clooney's wedding planners, will cost an estimated $50 million. 'It's going to be perfect — everything they wanted and with everyone they love,' our source predicted last month. The pair reportedly sourced almost all of their wedding goods from Venetian vendors, turning to the city's oldest pastry maker, Rosa Salva, and Murano glass blower Laguna B. Before their big day, Bezos and the former news anchor — who rented out the entire Aman Venice hotel for their stay — geared up with an opulent welcome party at the Madonna dell'Orto church that ended early because of a thunderstorm. They also hosted a pre-wedding foam party aboard his $500 million megayacht, Koru. As Page Six previously reported, Bezos and Sánchez quietly donated to a number of local charities in Venice as part of their wedding planning process. The revelation came about after protesters gathered all over the City of Canals to criticise the business magnate, arguing, 'If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax.' Bezos proposed to Sánchez aboard Koru in May 2023 after five years together. The duo began dating in 2019; however, they avoided being seen together publicly until after their respective divorces were finalised. Sánchez was previously married to Patrick Whitesell, with whom she shares son Evan, 19, and daughter Eleanor, 17. She is also mum to son Nikko, 24, whose father is Tony Gonzalez. Meanwhile, Bezos shares three sons and one daughter with his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Peeking into a desire: Exhibition unveils hidden worlds
Tenderness and camaraderie are difficult to find these days. Conflict and prejudice predominate, directed especially at those whose sheer existence seems unacceptable to certain regimes. Rights and protections hard-won through decades of collective action have been overturned at a single stroke of a permanent marker, institutional obligations and responsibilities ignored, and critical voices silenced. As in the not-so-distant past, many of those voices are now forced to speak in code, creating subcultures of mutual recognition and support to avoid censorship and persecution. Tender Comrade, a thematically tight yet conceptually rich display of recent Chinese works at White Rabbit Gallery until November 16, is a timely invitation to enter some of these cultures and communities. The fine line between identification and voyeurism is an underlying theme across the exhibition's four floors, positioning the visitor alternately as tourist, confidante, or something in between. Images of hidden or unspoken desires, masquerade and performance, coded messages and conscious artifice recur throughout, both in the works and in the nested composition of the display itself. The show is billed as an insight into LGBTQ communities in China but primarily foregrounds gay and transgender identities. This is clear immediately on entering the ground-floor space, dominated by a larger-than-life pair of inflatable legs, anatomically complete to the smallest detail. A low opening cut into the partition at the entrance gives the option to brush past this detail, though most visitors instead ducked discreetly under a raised knee. The legs are one component of several mixed-media works by Xia Han that draw attention to the gender fluidity inherent in fantasy role-playing games. These are paired with Shang Liang's Boxing Man No. 4 and No. 7, specimens of inflated hypermasculinity that make skilful use of their oil medium to suggest a visceral, pulsating fleshiness. Moving to the first floor, a series of video works are projected on screens that resemble the ornamented reverse of ancient bronze mirrors in a passage-like space. Conflicting soundtracks bleed together, with the high-pitched tones of Jiū Society's satirical rendering of a viral North Korean hit Jiu Bobo demanding attention. This and other works by Jiū Society member Fang Di, ink painter Liu Yi, documentary filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, Wang Haiyang, and Magdalen Wong cover a range of subjects but are united by a focus on fluid metamorphosis. Zheng Bo's lingering meditations on 'ecoqueer' desire in Pteridophilia 3 and 4 are given a wall of their own in the next space, facing a series of vivid landscapes in acrylics on canvas by Zhu Zi. The probing branches and coral-like growths of the latter take on phallic connotations when paired with Zheng's sexualised ferns, writhing and pulsing to a soundtrack of quickened breath and rustling leaves in an unearthly paradise of unrestrained pleasures. In Daoist mythology, such realms are the retreat of the Immortals – humans who have ascended beyond the limits of the mundane. References to the past continue in the next section, where dividing curtains and the brightly coloured face paint in Sin Wai Kin's paired videos The Breaking Story and It's Always You echo the mannered artifice of Peking Opera. Between these, the inclusion of Lin Zhipeng's candid photographs of nude young men smoking and posing in an ambiguous space enclosed by red drapes introduces a suggestion of voyeuristic scrutiny. Similar themes resurface in the coded homoeroticism of Wang Jun-Jieh's Passion, a sultry narrative of delayed gratification punctuated by telescoping lenses and spurting guns against an explicitly phallic pier. These subtle allusions to the classical past are the clearest statement of another key objective of Tender Comrade, which seeks not only to represent contemporary LGBTQ communities but to reveal hidden or erased moments of queerness throughout Chinese history. The display can be read as a 'queering' of the canon of Chinese art history, rejecting a conventional focus on large-scale and overtly political works in favour of a subtler and more transgressive artistic vocabulary. Most of the artists included are relatively young or not yet as well-known as their more established peers, either conspicuously absent or unobtrusively set to one side. Works by Ren Hang and Pixy Liao, for example, two of the biggest names, are tactfully displayed on the first-floor landings.
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
Peeking into a desire: Exhibition unveils hidden worlds
Tenderness and camaraderie are difficult to find these days. Conflict and prejudice predominate, directed especially at those whose sheer existence seems unacceptable to certain regimes. Rights and protections hard-won through decades of collective action have been overturned at a single stroke of a permanent marker, institutional obligations and responsibilities ignored, and critical voices silenced. As in the not-so-distant past, many of those voices are now forced to speak in code, creating subcultures of mutual recognition and support to avoid censorship and persecution. Tender Comrade, a thematically tight yet conceptually rich display of recent Chinese works at White Rabbit Gallery until November 16, is a timely invitation to enter some of these cultures and communities. The fine line between identification and voyeurism is an underlying theme across the exhibition's four floors, positioning the visitor alternately as tourist, confidante, or something in between. Images of hidden or unspoken desires, masquerade and performance, coded messages and conscious artifice recur throughout, both in the works and in the nested composition of the display itself. The show is billed as an insight into LGBTQ communities in China but primarily foregrounds gay and transgender identities. This is clear immediately on entering the ground-floor space, dominated by a larger-than-life pair of inflatable legs, anatomically complete to the smallest detail. A low opening cut into the partition at the entrance gives the option to brush past this detail, though most visitors instead ducked discreetly under a raised knee. The legs are one component of several mixed-media works by Xia Han that draw attention to the gender fluidity inherent in fantasy role-playing games. These are paired with Shang Liang's Boxing Man No. 4 and No. 7, specimens of inflated hypermasculinity that make skilful use of their oil medium to suggest a visceral, pulsating fleshiness. Moving to the first floor, a series of video works are projected on screens that resemble the ornamented reverse of ancient bronze mirrors in a passage-like space. Conflicting soundtracks bleed together, with the high-pitched tones of Jiū Society's satirical rendering of a viral North Korean hit Jiu Bobo demanding attention. This and other works by Jiū Society member Fang Di, ink painter Liu Yi, documentary filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, Wang Haiyang, and Magdalen Wong cover a range of subjects but are united by a focus on fluid metamorphosis. Zheng Bo's lingering meditations on 'ecoqueer' desire in Pteridophilia 3 and 4 are given a wall of their own in the next space, facing a series of vivid landscapes in acrylics on canvas by Zhu Zi. The probing branches and coral-like growths of the latter take on phallic connotations when paired with Zheng's sexualised ferns, writhing and pulsing to a soundtrack of quickened breath and rustling leaves in an unearthly paradise of unrestrained pleasures. In Daoist mythology, such realms are the retreat of the Immortals – humans who have ascended beyond the limits of the mundane. References to the past continue in the next section, where dividing curtains and the brightly coloured face paint in Sin Wai Kin's paired videos The Breaking Story and It's Always You echo the mannered artifice of Peking Opera. Between these, the inclusion of Lin Zhipeng's candid photographs of nude young men smoking and posing in an ambiguous space enclosed by red drapes introduces a suggestion of voyeuristic scrutiny. Similar themes resurface in the coded homoeroticism of Wang Jun-Jieh's Passion, a sultry narrative of delayed gratification punctuated by telescoping lenses and spurting guns against an explicitly phallic pier. These subtle allusions to the classical past are the clearest statement of another key objective of Tender Comrade, which seeks not only to represent contemporary LGBTQ communities but to reveal hidden or erased moments of queerness throughout Chinese history. The display can be read as a 'queering' of the canon of Chinese art history, rejecting a conventional focus on large-scale and overtly political works in favour of a subtler and more transgressive artistic vocabulary. Most of the artists included are relatively young or not yet as well-known as their more established peers, either conspicuously absent or unobtrusively set to one side. Works by Ren Hang and Pixy Liao, for example, two of the biggest names, are tactfully displayed on the first-floor landings.
